Currently, companies in charge of elevator maintenance are required to maintain and update, for each elevator, a maintenance record file that is available to the equipment owner for review. This maintenance record file is normally located on the elevator itself or at the maintenance operator's site. Currently, maintenance record files are manually completed by the technicians in charge of maintenance during each equipment operation. Sometimes, a technician may forget to complete the maintenance record file after a maintenance or repair operation. In addition, the information that he/she writes may be incomplete, or even insufficient to determine the exact nature of an operation. And in some cases, it may be incorrect or illegible.
Furthermore, the equipment owner does not have any way of checking the reliability of the information contained in this record file, nor that it contains each visit.
Maintenance companies also have oral and written operation reports that allow them to manage the activity of their technicians and count their on-site operations. Nevertheless, the manual nature of these reports does not provide any guarantee in terms of their completeness and accuracy.
The French patent application N° 00 12675 submitted by the applicant describes a remote management system for the maintenance of a set of equipment that comprises local monitoring units installed near the equipment to be monitored, each including means for detecting operation failures on the equipment; an equipment maintenance company calculator, connected to the local units through a telecommunications network for receiving and processing failure data transmitted by the local units; an equipment manager calculator that receives from the local units the same data than that of the maintenance company calculator. Each local unit is associated to monitored equipment and further comprises command means that allow a maintenance technician to signal the start and end of their operation on the related equipment. These events are then transmitted to the maintenance company and management calculators for storage.
Nevertheless, this system does not guarantee the completeness and accuracy of the information entered by maintenance technicians in the maintenance record file.